Religion Is A Mercy Analysis

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A Mercy is strongly concerned with themes of religion and mercy and their connection and their divergence. It depicts a range of religious communities and paradigms: colonial Roman Catholics, Anabaptists and Presbyterians, English Anglicans and Quakers, and an amalgam of aboriginal American, African, and European beliefs in Lina’s character. Nearly all of religious groups appear more preoccupied with divine retribution than with salvific grace.
Rebekah reveals that “Religion, as [she] experienced it from her mother, was a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred.” The radical Separatists who live near Jacob left their original congregation “over the question of the Chosen versus the universal nature of salvation.” Florens happens upon a religious …show more content…

She writes it was not “...a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.” Florens’s mother gives her to Jacob, rather than allow her to grow to womanhood in the nightmarish world of the tobacco plantation. The reasons for her mother’s choice are not revealed until the novel’s closing chapter, when the reader receives her voice and memory. “There is no protection,” she communicates to Florens. “To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal.” The mother hopes that Jacob will be a kinder master to his daughter than the Spanish planter: “One chance, I thought. There is no protection but there is difference . . . . Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight.” To give her daughter away is the only way to save her, and this becomes the mercy of the novel’s title. Even this mercy, however, is dispiriting in its insistence that God has abandoned these people: “It was not a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.” Morrison’s vision, while it may redeem our view of the abandoning mother, suggests that in a world without God, there is no protection. Acts of kindness and humanity—large and small—run through the story,

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